On the eve of the 2012 election, the White House is pushing to politicize the impartial U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The administration is also trying to bypass the congressional oversight that protects the independence of the neutral agency.

The BLS is the nation’s premier nonpartisan statistical agency reporting on the state of the American labor market. For more than a century, both political parties have considered BLS to be independent and politically untouchable.

The BLS monthly unemployment data is a key factor contributing to the president’s unpopularity.

Over the last year, the administration has refused to fill the two top BLS positions. They have yet to nominate anyone to replace outgoing BLS Commissioner Keith Hall, whose term expires in January, and the number two post previously held by Deputy Commissioner Philip Rones has been vacant since last summer. Rones had been the bureau’s deputy since 2003, and made it widely known ahead of time that he would be retiring by the middle of 2010.

BLS career professional and Associate Commissioner John Galvin has been given limited responsibilities to cover some of the deputy duties on an acting basis, but the White House has indicated it has no interest in promoting Galvin to the post of commissioner.

A retired career economist at the U.S. Department of Labor told PJ Media the administration wants to put its own political allies into the bureau, eschewing promotion from within:

Traditionally, the deputy commissioner position has been filled by promotion from within the ranks of experienced BLS career professionals, and when Rones retired from the deputy job last summer, Hall proposed promoting a highly qualified associate commissioner [John Galvin] to the position. The labor secretary and deputy secretary rebuffed that and made it clear that they wanted someone of their choosing from outside the existing career cadre.

The Senate could get involved by exercising its Senate confirmation process for a new commissioner — but the administration has circumvented the process by not nominating anyone. Nominations usually are announced as early as six months before the expiration of a term, but with a few weeks left before Hall leaves office, it is clear no commissioner will be running the bureau through much of 2012.

This has led to speculation that the White House is trying to circumvent the Senate so as to appoint a deputy whose position does not need Senate confirmation, and who would defer to the White House and to politically aggressive Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

One source told PJ Media the president would like to install Betsey Stevenson as the deputy commissioner. Stevenson is a Princeton academic and loyal political ally who worked as chief economist for Solis. Stevenson would be rejected by many in the Senate, which has regarded political allies as inappropriate for running the nonpartisan BLS.

Although the meddling with the BLS has received little coverage, economists and Republicans in Congress are decrying the effort. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under the Bush administration, called the administration’s tactics “outrageous.” She told PJ Media that meddling with the BLS personnel process could be a prelude to eventual tampering with unemployment surveys and results:

There is concern that somehow the administration will try to influence the employment numbers in this very important year coming up for election by putting a designated individual in that slot and getting around the Senate confirmation process.

55 Comments, 25 Threads

You can make statistics do just about anything you want them to do, even show that unemployment is getting better when it’s not. I always find it amazing that the “official” unemployment rate is 8.6%, but if you factor in all of the other people wanting a job, wanting full-time jobs, or just “discouraged” about finding a job, the rate magically climbs to around 15%. Well, is it or isn’t it 15%? Pretty soon they will have a separate category for people who were “thinking” about getting a job but can’t find one. And what about the people who have just given up looking for jobs? Why have they magically disappeared from the BLS figures?

This country is in bad shape, regardless of what figures you look at. The only thing that will make a change is by getting rid of Obama in 2012. At least that will be a start. If we don’t, unemployment will continue to get worse, regardless of which figures you look at.

That part isn’t a conspiracy; they are pretty straightforward about how they measure the official “unemployment” rate. You have to be out of work and seeking employment through a state “unemployment” office. If you’re new to the workforce, say, a new college grad, and seeking employment on Monster.com, you won’t show up as unemployed. If you’ve run out of UI benefits and stop contacting the unemployment office seeking employment, you won’t show up as unemployed. These are hard, measurable numbers though they are susceptible to manipulation at the state level, of which more below. They try to do some surveying to get a number that includes disaffected workers, underemployed, etc., but it is not nearly as accurate.

Actually you are completely wrong. The BLS has something called the birth-death adjustment that has been misused to hide real unemployment during the Obama adminstration. It has been used forever but in a more believable manner in other administrations. The birth-death adjustment numbers are pulled out of thin air to create jobs that do not exist. Just look back at the numbers over the last 2-3 years, the adjustmants have been huge with no explanation of the methodology used to justify them.

Also, the Democratic governor of North Carolina has been caught receiving early release of the numbers so that her spokespeople can spin the numbers in her favor. How many others are getting the numbers early for financial and political benefit? There will be major scandals within the BLS when this administration is overthrown.

The birth-death adjustment creates jobs out of thin air and is used to make the employment picture look better. It is not a measure of jobs created expect to pad NFP to make the employment picture look better than it really is.

Unemployment is over 20% by objective measures, which makes unemployment comparable to the 1930′s. The purpose of the government statistics is to keep the criminals in congress in their sinecures.

The reason it doesn’t feel as bad as it was in the 1930′s is because so many people are dependent on government handouts anyway, and SS and Medicare also cover a lot of people who would have been suffering even more in the 1930′s. Of course, most of all of that is funded by bankrupting future generations.

In addition, the basic necessities of food, shelter and fuel are a smaller % now than in the 1930′s of a person’s financial requirments. If those 3 categories represent 70% of average income, and you are unemployed, you are really hurting. If they only represent 50%, you are still hurting, but not as much. In the 1930′s, people didn’t have medical insurance, $100 shoes, cable tv, restaurant meals 3 times a weeek, and iphone data plans to give up in hard times, not that anyone on welfare gives that stuff up anyway. Only people who are used to supporting themselves do that. And besides, people on welfare get medical care for free that we pay over a thousand dollars a monthe for.

Even the 16.4 is bogus. There are objective organizations that measure unemployment. Find them.

For example, if you stop looking for a job, you fall out of the statistics completely. Self-employed people don’t get counted. People involuntarilly forced into retirement don’t get counted. Moms who need to go back to work don’t get counted. People just coming into the workforce don’t get counted.

When all of those truly unemployed categories (and more) get counted, un / underemployment is about 22%.

Age does give an advantage, although Google is whittling it down to nothing very quickly. During the ’72 election, didn’t Nixon wonder about all the jews in the BLS? It seems this is nothing new at all — just unmentionable under PC. You know, like the Dems brushing off white working-class voters in favor of non-whites. Okay, you dim-bulbs, this is as post-racial as Homo sapiens can ever get.

It’s chilling to realize just how confident the Dear Leader is that the left-wing mainstream media will ignore this attempt to UNbalance the scales of a non-partisan agency. The unemployment numbers are problematic for Dear Leader’s reelection? It’s easier to just contaminate the information rather than make any attempt to fix the actual problem.

That horse is out of the barn here, too. Some time ago, they pulled out some “volatile” elements from the market basket used to measure CPI. What we have now is the deflation in the housing market holding down the CPI because housing is so heavily weighted while other elements of the basket, e.g., food and utilities, are inflating dramatically. Since CPI is the common measure of inflation for wage and benefit adjustments, the government can “truthfully” say that there is no inflation, while those on fixed incomes or still making a mortgage payment set prior to the housing collapse are having their income eaten by inflation.

We went through this in Alaska with the oil price crash of the mid-’80s. The bottom fell out of the housing market which pulled the CPI down; we actually had deflation in some periods. Yet, the goods and services people bought every day were fairly seriously inflating and our employees were screaming bloody murder for wage increases. The then-Democrat governor told them he’d give them a wage increase when he saw the CPI go up. Actually, bad as it was, the Exxon Valdez spill broke the deflationary spiral when Exxon poured billions into the economy to clean up the spill and the employees got their first general wage increase since ’85 in ’90.

Policy / Politics trumps:
States rights – Arizona
Gun Control – Fast & Furious
Business law – GM Chrysler
Law – Black Panthers
Congress – Libya
Military law on enemy combatants
City Governance – OWS
EPA vs all business
I long for a President who acts Presidential and doesn’t blame or complain

I would suggest, for the time being (until the end of the Obama Administration), that any information regarding employment and unemployment simply be marked as “Bureau of Labor Statistics, Hussein Technique” or it’s acronym.

For a bunch who admires mao, chavez, and castro this is par for the course. The goal of the left is to maintain and consolidate power. Keeping up appearances is far more important than concrete solutions to serious problems. You cant say they arent consistent (and predictable).

Why should BLS be any different from every other agency they’ve polluted. Not that it took much to pollute them because GWB, typical Republican, put a thin veneer of appointees in and mostly left his government in the hands of holdovers. If the Hildebeast had won she’d have found a good bit of her dear husband’s administration sitting there waiting for her.

White house politicizing Bureau of Labor statistics? The White House is politicing everything in the bid for re-election. My best guess would be, that all the numbers released by this administration, have been skewed, to make thing look better than they really are.

Without this overt politization at the DC level, BLS is very susceptible to politicization at the state level. BLS collects and analyzes data provided by state labor departments or job service offices or whatever a particular state calls them. In the unionized states these entities are owned by organized labor. Even with a Republican governor, the commissioner/secretary/director level appointed head is going to be vetted by the AFL-CIO and the labor department will in the main do what the AFL-CIO wants done, and they can easily manipulate the data reported to BLS.

For real information, contradicting finagling by BLS, go to shadowstats.com.

All of a sudden, for example, unemployment data of 9.1% or even 8.6% balloons up to a believable 22.9% (no. 397). Oct 2011.

Sure, a top down, command type economic czar will figure figures as is wont a ‘dialectal materialist’ will do. Happens in North Korea, Cuba, China, Russia, etc. Look at where all this command type economics has led the EuroZone?

These nations (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are perfect examples of how useless twisting, bending, tweaking and fudging of their economies, since the fall of the Ottoman empire, have ended up with the same results. Abject failures all.

Only one system can efficiently allocate scarce resources of: land, labor and capital. And that is capitalism, a market driven economy.

‘Dialectal materialism’ is Marxism’s convoluted frustration with how to tax and spend without impoverishing a nation…funny, it’s an oxymoron.

But, Mr. Obama is convinced marxist/leninist economic policies are necessary for all Americans to equally participate in some “shared sacrifice.”

His re-election will see a flurry of policies designed to achieve all, or in part, these stated goals. American’s freedoms will be eliminated, one by one. Next, will be a host of regulations designed to ultimately confiscate all weapons in American citizen’s possession.

Vote massively this 2013 for massive fraud is all around us. God Bless America.

This is shoot the messenger twice. Not only do they monkey with the leadership of the BLS but they try to politicize the choosing of the 60,000 american homes that are used for acquiring the statistics anyway. For instance, my home has been randomly chosen for the last two consecutive years to be one of those 60,000 homes. The odds of my home being selected even one time are about 1 in 1,400. The odds of this happening twice in two consecutive years is almost 1 in 2,000,000. I have to suspend my disbelief in order to buy into those odds. The reason? I suspect it is so they can report another gainfully employed American in their numbers. I wonder how many other people have had a similar experience in the last two years? Sheesh. The communists are on the throne and they aren’t going to just go away. They will try to control all information that we get and the media is so afraid of them that they just report what the administration tells them. Anyone else wonder why the administration always knows when the media crosses the line on any minutia of the official administration position, while at the same time they can’t even come up with a correct response to anything that happens overseas? I guess the rest of the world doesn’t get to vote in our elections yet, eh?

Our household was selected for one of the BLS Surveys (Income, as I recall) a few years ago. The very polite and competent BLS employee who handled our survey informed us that, if we agreed to participate (we did), we would be surveyed every month for a 4-month period for each of 2 years (other groups were surveyed in the two other 4-month periods). So, unless the BLS has changed procedures, your 2 year selection was SOP.

Nice to hear that, but I told them to go away and stop bothering us during the second contact last year. They told me that they just had to contact me at least two more times, which they did. They never mentioned to me that they would come back again this year, even during the very heated final conversation I had with them last year. So, I assumed that I was randomly selected again this year. Even with only a single random selection, the odds against getting selected are about once every 17 lifetimes. My point was that, even if they claim they are doing a public service, they manipulate the numbers they get and render the whole exercise a complete waste of time and taxpayer’s money. I don’t give a damn whether the unemployment rate is reported to be 8.6% or, more likely, 18.6%. This is the crappiest our economy has performed since the 1930s. I can’t stop the government from manipulating statistics, but I won’t be a party to it.

Interesting how on the same day, I read two articles on BLS, here’s the other one, Gov. Perdue is a Democrat. Everything in DC is political.

“Since as early as January 2011, and perhaps before then, Gov. Bev Perdue’s press office has received access to confidential employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics hours if not days before its scheduled release, quite likely in violation of federal law. The governor’s staff used its early access to massage the monthly employment press release that reported jobs data to the public.

Documents and correspondence obtained by Carolina Journal show that the Division of Employment Security, formerly known as the Employment Security Commission, sent a draft of the press release each month to Perdue’s press office. The governor’s spokesmen typically rewrote the text and added a positive spin, even if the data did not support Perdue’s talking points.

The glowing quotes were attributed to Lynn Holmes, director of the employment agency, but the documents show the quotes were approved and probably written by a Perdue press aide, either Chrissy Pearson or Mark Johnson.

In several instances, DES spokesman Larry Parker cautioned Pearson or Johnson against using extraneous or unverifiable information in a release to boost Perdue’s image. At times, the Perdue communications team would push back, and the release would undergo several revisions before final publication.

While the operation may sound like a harmless effort to add political spin to the release of jobs data, sharing confidential BLS estimates while they are protected by an embargo violates a federal law barring the early release of employment data. This is no small matter: A conviction for breaching the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act of 2002 carries a fine of up to $250,000, up to five years in prison, or both.

The data, including monthly estimates for current job totals, the labor force, and the unemployment rate, are produced by BLS with some minor assistance from the Labor Market Information Division of DES.

Democrats are good people. Good people don’t do bad things. Republicans are bad people. Bad people do bad things. Only bad things are illegal. Therefore, that stuff is only illegal if Republicans do it. Got it?

I was merely documenting a fact, Gov. Perdue is a Democrat, the article suggests she is getting advanced information and she should not. The BLS is supposed to be nonpartisan. Both parties have done and still are doing damage to our country. It’s a disgrace what our elected officials get away with, both D’s and R’s.

That there is some equivalence between what Rs do and what Ds do is one of the lies Democrats tell constantly and fools believe them. Most Republicans are too damned dumb about the internal operations of government to lie, cheat, or steal with any subtlety, so they do it hamfistedly and get caught.

If Randy Cunningham had been a Democrat, he’d have set up a bunch of interlocked non-profits and for-profits doing work for the government, used the appropriation process and earmarking to funnel a whole bunch of money to them. hired a good government accountant with top of the line GASPE skills to make sure his piece got raked off into offshore accounts and today he’d be a highly respected multi-millionaire senator instead of a former congressman and convict. Democrats had untrammelled power for so long that they made most of their stealing and scamming legal and accepted; Republicans still just try to reach in the cookee jar from time to time.

She was losing to Pat McCrory (R) by at least 10 its before this, I hope it’s by 20 afterward. Obama won NC by only 14,000 votes first go round, I don’t think it will be close this time. Hope he isn’t counting those 15 votes! we have had one Dem scandal after another these past months, most by the entrenched lifetime Pols from down east, I truly believe that their time in the sun is over.

Perdue’s staff were receiving the reports from The ESL (Employment Security Commission. Easley, her predecessor was also caught doing so. Both are democrats and both are corrupt as Hell. I know. I live in NC.

The most base fact most in this thread are missing is the fact they are even getting this data ahead of time and it is a crime to do so. These people are getting the numbers early and spinning it to their advantage. Until we start throwing the book at these corrupticians, nothing is going to change.

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover,”.

The pompous ass, “we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make”. They all know better than the rest of us.

In “Injustice”, Christian Adams noted “personnel is policy”, and clearly this administration understands this. Once again, they criticize opposition for things they are actually doing themselves. Recall how they charged the Bush administration with politicizing the bureaucracy (see current Adams column for example)? An amazing and brazen way to deflect attention from their own actions.

Under the Obama regime we now live in the kingdom of lies. Everything coming from this criminal government is based on a lie. Hilary Clinton spreads the lie of the so called arab spring; Eric Holder spreads the lie of his corrupt handling of the gun scandal, Janet Napolitano continues day after day to issue the complete lie concerning the border and illegal immigration. Wait any minute and we will have another so called swine flu epidemic or some such nonsense. Americans now are steeped in a false universe and led by evil doers who cannot do anything but lie. God save the former United States of America.

I do not like Barack Obama
I do not like his health care scam
I do not like that sneaky crook
I do not like how he cooks the books
I do not like it when he steals
I do not like his secret deals
I do not like that metro man
I do not like his ‘YES WE CAN.’
I do not like his spending spree
I do not like when he takes from me
I do not like his smug replies
I do not like his constant lies
I do not like his kind of hope
I do not like him, what a dope, dope, dope

An honest Obama Administration is based on the idea that a turd can be held by the clean end.

You mean it’s gotten worse. It has seemed for some time that Dem admin data later has to be corrected down, when nobody is watching, and Rep admins get corrected up, ditto. This seems to be true of every Govt department. After all, the govt employees are, according to all poles I’ve seen, overwhelmingly liberal Dems. Am I wrong?

The production level employees, both at the DC and regional level, mostly vote Democrat, but there aren’t likely to be many activists or true ideological liberals. The management level and, expecially, the appointee level are going to be pro-labor, rabidly so in a Democrat administration. The USDOL and its state law analogs is the chattel of the AFL-CIO and they vett every appointee, which appointees control who gets appointed to management and supervisory positions. Republican administrations couldn’t fill all the appointee slots with loyal, dedicated Republicans if their lives depended on it, so they mostly leave the Democrats in place except at the top levels, and sometimes even there.

The paradox of the welfare state is that it cannot grow or last so long as its economy truly is prosperous. It exists for the purpose of transferring wealth and extracting a handsome price for acting as the middleman. If everyone who wanted one could suddenly be given a well paying private sector job overnight the welfare state would be put out of existence.

Its a balancing act. They need the economy to be robust enough to provide the goodies they hand out, but they don’t want it to be healthy enough to solve the problems for which they claim to be the solution. Is it any wonder that government policies often seem stupid and cause more problems than they solve? These are not bugs to the people who make their livings implementing them–they are features.

So,now we know that BLS = BuLlShit. There is a towering need in this country for
a communist h*t squad.The present manipulators of our government are using the
law to promote revolution in this country, and, if they do succeed in the next election,that is exactly what they will get.That, and a mass out migration of
citizens who feel their country has been stolen.Every Friday afternoon,the news
dump lets us know how the screw gets even tighter and the public is powerless
till election time when, we know the outcome will be stolen like the last time.
We truly have become a Banana Republic.

All the pundits have been speculating that Obama might have a chance of reelection if employment numbers improve, but were wondering how it would ever happen, with the dismal state of our economy. Now we know, it doesn’t need to actually happen, he just has to make the rubes BELEIVE that it has happened. Obama just needs to take over the agency generating the numbers, and create his own phony numbers, showing a stunning jobs recovery, which will be reported by the MSM without critical examination, and the rubes will beleive in the fulfillment of HOPE and CHANGE. Yes citizen, we have always been at war with East Asia, just look at the newspaper, the article proving it is right under big brothers picture.